Yet in the search for Air France 447, an Airbus 330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, the first signs of wreckage were found a day after the crash.

More than 48 hours after Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 went missing en route to Beijing, investigators have still no debris and are unable to give any indication what happened to the flight.

The Air France Airbus also sent automated warning messages to its manufacturer as it began to go out of control in 2009. Boeing does not appear to have received any similar messages from its 777, leaving no clues of its fate.

The TWA plane, a Boeing 747, blew up at 13,000 feet – much lower than the 35,000 feet MH370 was flying when it went missing – yet its debris scattered into three separate areas and some parts were never found.

"If there was some sort of explosion at cruising altitude then you could be looking at a search field that is hundreds of miles wide," Mr Hall said.

The FBI spent over a year sifting through the wreckage of the TWA flight before it was able to rule out terrorism.

Mary Schiavo, the former inspector general of the US department of transportation, told CNN that terrorism could not be excluded in the case of MH370 just because no group had claimed credit.

She gave the example of Philippine Airlines Flight 434, which was badly damaged after Islamist terrorists used it as a test run for their explosives in December 1994.

The bombers never took responsibility for the attack, which killed one person but failed to bring down the 747.

"They used fake passports, they planted the explosives, and they didn't want to be detected because it was a trial run," Ms Schiavo said.